Qualify
by TMBlue
Summary: COMPLETE! On their final night at Shell Cottage, before the Gringotts break-in, Ron seeks out Hermione for a conversation when he can't sleep. Mid-DH.


_**A/N:** I've been MIA again due to some really heavy personal shit. But, instead of focusing on that right now, I wrote this. I have been slowly working on a few pieces of smut, and a few follow up chapters to the big incomplete stories I have on here, but this just felt like what I needed today, here on this melancholy Fic Friday! I'll do my best to carry on the #ficfriday tradition next week, but, until then, I hope everyone is off to have a lovely weekend, and I hope you enjoy this little fluffy angsty thing._

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 **1 May 1998**

It was much too early to get up, but then he'd been alternately waking with Harry throughout the night, and he figured Hermione might be in a similar state, worrying about the details. Of course she was. And he wasn't going to feel any better about anything just lying here, staring at the ceiling.

He stood quietly from his bedroll, shuffling socked feet up the stairs, thinking absently that if they were going to die, he at least wanted to have a decent breakfast in a few hours, a last slice of bacon to go out on...

He grinned to himself as he approached her half-closed door, but all thoughts of food fled quickly at the sight of her sitting on the edge of her bed, face turned away from him, staring out a window at the still-dark sky, stars obscured by thick clouds, the world cloaked with heaviness.

He pressed a palm to her door, watching it slowly open wider until it creaked, alerting her to his presence. She gasped lightly, startled, and turned round, caramel eyes staring in starlight across at him as he licked his lips.

"Can't sleep either?" he asked pointlessly, and as she shook her head, he took her lack of instruction to mean he could enter. Once he'd slipped through the widened space between door and frame, he leaned backward and shut the door softly again, realising almost immediately how he'd trapped himself inside a silently ringing room with...

There were no words for who she was to him. It hit him, suddenly, as he continued his speechless stare across at her. There was a word for _everyone_ in his life. Harry... best friend. Ginny... sister. Bill, George, Fred, Percy, Charlie... brothers. Mum. Dad. Professor. Mentor. Friend. Blimey, what else was there? He'd reached the end of the list, and she wasn't there.

He swallowed, and she stood, looking down at her bare feet for a moment before sighing and moving a bit closer.

"We shouldn't be up at this hour," she whispered. "We won't be any good if we're exhausted."

But he knew her words were pointless for them both. Neither had any plans for sleep now.

"What am I to you?" he asked, before he could realise the implications of what he was asking. Her eyes widened slightly, and he shook his head. "I'm saying... what would you call me, to someone meeting us for the first time?"

She pressed her lips together.

"Ron," she said.

He blinked before his grin spread.

"Clever," he teased, running a hand through his hair.

"Why are you thinking about this now?" she asked, back to whispering again.

"Dunno," he shrugged.

"I think we've been through enough to at least be friends again..." she said, not quite a whisper this time, but timid... soft. She averted her eyes, and he understood what she meant too clearly. His chest filled with a familiar balloon of anxiety and regret.

"I wasn't asking it like that..." he trailed off, unsure how to explain what he'd really meant. He wasn't even sure himself.

She nodded, eyes still cast away, distant and glowing a bit, focused on a random spot on the wall to his left.

Silence crippled him again, and he waited for someone to breathe too loudly, for a sniff or a cough, for her to clear her throat or- _anything_. He was so bad at filling the void when they were alone. He wondered if he'd ever figure out how to do it right.

"Listen," she began, "we have too much on our minds right now. I'm worried about absolutely every aspect of this plan. There are literally hundreds of ways this could go wrong, you know."

And though he was scared, too, her words reminded him of who she was, even if it wasn't quite enough to place her in his list of relations. And it made him smile, just a little.

"Right," he started, thinking he ought to leave her alone, give her time to sort through the mess in her brain. She wouldn't be able to rest until-

"You know this is a bit hard for me," she said, interrupting his thoughts with a strained, airy voice, "because... honestly, lately, you make me... _nervous_. But... y-you're amazing. You know I think you're amazing," and she glanced his way again, halting his parting lips, "don't you?"

This was not what he'd come here for. He couldn't have hoped to hear her say something so... What was it, this feeling, the way his eyes had started to water? He wasn't embarrassed, as he'd often been before when she'd compliment him. And oh, he could run through his catalogue of those moments without hesitating to recall them. They were forefront, more so than he'd allowed himself to realise.

"Uh..." he tried, clearing his throat, pulling up the first words that came to mind, the type of words he ought never to say aloud. "The last thing you said to me, last night, was 'stop hovering and go to bed'... and then last month you told me to bugger off when I asked if you wanted tea, and then-"

"Shut up," she interrupted, reaching forward, grabbing his wrist too tight and closing her eyes. He hadn't even realised they were close enough together for her to reach him like that. A small shock shot up his arm from her warm touch.

"I'm doing that thing you hate again, aren't I," he said through a suddenly scratchy voice, "not being serious."

Her eyes shot open.

"I don't hate that."

He raised his brows in question, and she shook her head slowly.

"Harry's serious," she said, and he wondered just how much she had buried in those two words... or was it just his own mind, heart and experience colouring it to look the way he wanted it to?

 _She'd told him he was amazing. She didn't want him to be like Harry._

"I'm not amazing," he said, grasping to keep holding on to the conversation, before he accidentally went too far down a spiraling thought to find a row. "I'm alive, and I'm maybe helpful because I can do whatever you tell me to, most of the time, and Harry is basically my brother, so I dunno, he knows I'd die before I'd let anything happen to him. But I'm not amazing."

"You aren't _allowed_ to say that," she said, quite firmly, still holding his wrist, he noticed. "Only _I'm_ allowed to say that, and maybe Harry. You _are_ whatever I say you are, to _me_ , alright?"

Her stare was so solid and real and intense.

"Hermione," he said, in his familiar attempt to push away from comfort, knowing that he'd found his own strength in angst, in being sure he wouldn't be good enough. He was having quite a hard time figuring out how to be neutral, much less _amazing_ , to anybody. "I left you both, or have you forgotten?"

She clucked her tongue and halfway rolled her eyes.

"Do you really want to talk about that again?"

"God, no," he breathed, suddenly terrified of punctuating their already strained night with the heft of _that_ conversation.

She almost smiled, releasing his wrist, but he didn't know what else to say now. He barely understood what they were even talking about, anymore. If he wasn't going to hate himself and apologise, and if she wasn't going to tell him to leave, then what was next?

"Look," she said softly, "you made a mistake. We've talked about it. And I do understand. And I know there's more to say, more you probably _want_ to say to me, but you don't have to do it now. And it doesn't change anything. I was cruel to you when you came back, but you really hurt me. I'm not saying I was right to be quite so... emotional. What I'm trying to say..." She trailed off, sighing. "Ron, I could never stop being your friend. I could never stop wanting you around."

He brushed his hand across his stubble and tried not to blink, thinking his eyes were probably too watery now.

"Okay," he said roughly, "but I've been kind of hoping you'd just... Well, after Malfoy Manor, there _was_ a lot of other shit happening. Sort of made our problems go away, which, really... it's what we always do... I don't want you to think I'm not going to feel bad about it anymore, or that I think you're done hating me a little bit for it."

"I don't hate you."

"You know what I mean."

She shrugged, and he scratched the back of his neck.

"I don't think there _is_ a word for what we are to each other," she said, chewing her bottom lip as she raised her brows up at him.

"Probably not," he half-smiled, clearing his throat.

"I've just been up here thinking..." she went on, "we could die any moment. We knew that from the beginning. But we weren't _living_ that way. If I saw a curse coming at me and knew it was over, I think the last thought I would have was that I could have fixed things with you and why was I so selfish that I didn't just let it go?"

His lips parted, but he couldn't actually figure out how to respond to that. His last thought would be something quite similar, actually. It had never occurred to him...

"After you were poisoned last year," she continued, "I started irrationally wondering if terrible things would happen to us just to get us to stop fighting."

"Surely we can work out an easier way," he slowly grinned, and she shook her head.

"That's why I'm telling you now..." she said, almost inaudible, "you- you're really important to me. I don't think you know how much..."

He swallowed, working up all the bits of scattered courage he'd found through the years and piling them together...

"I don't think you know either."

Her eyes were glowing, and she wasn't looking away this time. She was so close, soft light reflected in her pupils, her tiny bare feet cloaked in his shadow.

"Then..." she sniffed, her voice cracking, "maybe we can think of something else, if we die. Maybe I'll just think how glad I was to be with you for so many years."

His stomach flipped, and he felt a flutter in his throat, restricting his ability to speak. So he nodded, shivering out the nerves and tension until he was safe here, darkness hiding the details of his face from her.

"Yeah, I'll be thinking that, too," and he did it before he could work it out... reached forward, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and pulled her against him until her face was pressed to his collarbone.

Her own arms went quickly around his waist, and she clung to the back of his shirt, not really crying, but hardly breathing either. He closed his eyes and dropped his nose to the top of her head, amazed that he could still faintly smell the perfume he'd bought for her, more than two years ago now.

They didn't need words for this. It was more peaceful than he could have imagined, death no longer feeling so heavy. And it seemed, in that moment, that they were no longer two people floating through the living toward an ending, but part of one story that didn't have finite borders. That was much bigger, much more important, than any words to qualify who they were.


End file.
